9 The J= , the τ, and charm New forms of matter, 1974{1976 In November 1974, Burton Richter at SLAC and Samuel Ting at Brookhaven were leading two very different experiments, one studying e+e− annihilation, the other the e+e− pairs produced in proton{beryllium collisions. Their simultaneous discovery of a new resonance with a mass of 3.1 GeV so profoundly altered particle physics that the period is often referred to as the \November Revolution." Word of the discoveries spread throughout the high energy physics community on November 11 and soon much of its research was directed towards the new particles. Ting led a group from MIT and Brookhaven measuring the rate of production of e+e− pairs in collisions of protons on a beryllium target. The experiment was able to measure quite accurately the invariant mass of the e+e− pair. This made the experiment much more sensitive than an earlier one at Brookhaven led by Leon Lederman. That experiment differed in that µ+µ− pairs were observed rather than e+e− pairs. Both these experiments investigated the Drell{Yan process whose motivation lay in the quark{parton model. The Drell{Yan process is the production of e+e− or µ+µ− pairs in hadronic collisions. Within the parton model, this can be understood as the annihilation of a quark from one hadron with an antiquark from the other to form a virtual photon. The virtual photon materializes some fraction of the time as a charged-lepton pair. The e-pair and µ-pair approaches to measuring lepton-pair production each have advantages and disadvantages. Because high-energy muons are more pene- trating than high-energy hadrons, muon pairs can be studied by placing absorbing material directly behind the interaction region. The absorbing material stops the strongly interacting π s, K s, and protons, but not the muons. This technique per- mits a very high counting rate since the muons can be separated from the hadrons over a large solid angle if enough absorber is available. The momenta of the muons can be determined by measuring their ranges. Together with the angle between the muons, this yields the invariant mass of the pair. Of course, the muons are subject to multiple Coulomb scattering in the absorber, so the resolution of the 257 technique is limited by this effect. The spectrum observed by Lederman's group fell with increasing invariant mass of the lepton pair. There was, however, a shoul- der in the spectrum between 3 and 4 GeV that attracted some notice, but whose real significance was obscured by the inadequate resolution. By contrast, electrons can be separated from hadrons by the nature of the showers they cause or by measuring directly their velocity (using Cerenkˇ ov coun- ters), which is much nearer the speed of light than that of a hadron of comparable momentum. The Cerenkˇ ov-counter approach is very effective in rejecting hadrons, but can be implemented easily only over a small solid angle. As a result, the counting rate is reduced. Ting's experiment used two magnetic spectrometers to measure separately the e+ and e−. The beryllium target was selected to mini- mize multiple Coulomb scattering. The achieved resolution was about 20 MeV for the e+e− pair, a great improvement over the earlier µ-pair experiment. The elec- trons and positrons were, in fact, identified using Cerenkˇ ov counters, time-of-flight information, and pulse height measurements. In the early 1970s Richter, together with his co-workers, fulfilled his long-time ambition of constructing an e+e− ring, SPEAR, at SLAC to study collisions in the 2.5 to 7.5 GeV center-of-mass energy region. Lower energy machines had already been built at Novosibirsk, Orsay, Frascati, and Cambridge, Mass. Richter himself had worked as early as 1958 with Gerard O'Neill and others on the pioneering e−e− colliding-ring experiments at Stanford. To exploit the new ring, SPEAR, the SLAC team, led by Richter and Martin Perl, and their LBL collaborators, led by William Chinowsky, Gerson Goldhaber, and George Trilling built a multipurpose large-solid-angle magnetic detector, the SLAC-LBL Mark I. The heart of this detector was a cylindrical magnetostrictive spark chamber inside a solenoidal magnet of 4.6 kG. This was surrounded by time- of-flight counters for particle velocity measurements, shower counters for photon detection and electron identification, and by proportional counters embedded in iron absorber slabs for muon identification. What could the Mark I Collaboration expect to find in e+e− annihilations? In the quark-parton model, since interactions between the quarks are ignored, the process e+e− qq is precisely analogous to e+e− µ+µ−, except that the charge ! ! of the quarks is either 2/3 or 1=3 and that the quarks come in three colors, as more − fully discussed in Chapter 10. Thus the ratio of the cross section for annihilation into hadrons to the cross section for the annihilation into muon pairs should simply be three times the sum of the squares of the charges of the quarks. This ratio, conventionally called R, was in 1974 expected to be 3[( 1=3)2 +(2=3)2 +( 1=3)2] = − − 2 counting the u, d, and s quarks. In fact, measurements made at the Cambridge Electron Accelerator (CEA) found that R was not constant in the center-of-mass region to be studied at SPEAR, but instead seemed to grow to a rather large value, perhaps 6. The first results from the Mark I detector confirmed this puzzling result. In 1974, Ting, Ulrich Becker, Min Chen and co-workers were taking data with their pair spectrometer at the Brookhaven AGS. By October of that year they found an e+e− spectrum consistent with expectations, except for a possible peak at 3.1 GeV. In view of the as-yet-untested nature of their new equipment, they proceeded to check and recheck this effect under a variety of experimental conditions and to collect more data. During this same period, the Mark I experiment continued measurements of the annihilation cross section into hadrons with an energy scan with steps of 200 MeV. Since no abrupt structure was anticipated, these steps seemed small enough. The data confirming and extending the CEA results were presented at the London Conference in June 1974. The data seemed to show a constant cross section rather than the 1=s behavior anticipated. (In the quark-parton model, there is no dimensionful constant, so the total cross section should vary as 1=s on dimensional grounds.) In addition, the value at center-of-mass energy 3.2 GeV appeared to be a little high. It was decided in June 1974 to check this by taking additional data at 3.1 and 3.3 GeV. Further irregularities at 3.1 GeV made it imperative in early November, 1974, before a cross section paper could be published, to remeasure this region. Scanning this region in very small energy steps revealed an enormous, narrow resonance. The increase in the cross section noticed at 3.2 GeV was the due to the tail of the resonance and the anomalies at 3.1 GeV were caused by variations in the precise energy of the beam near the lower edge of the resonance, where the cross section was rising rapidly. By Monday, November 11 (at which time the first draft of the paper was already written) Richter learned from Sam Ting (who too had a draft of a paper announcing the new particle) about the MIT-BNL results on the resonance (named J by Ting ), and vice versa. Clearly, both experiments had observed the same resonance. Word quickly reached Frascati, where Giorgio Bellettini and co-workers managed to push the storage ring beyond the designed maximum of 3 GeV and confirmed the discovery. Papers reporting the results at Brookhaven, SLAC, and Frascati all appeared in the same issue of Physical Review Letters (Refs. 9.1, 9.2, 9.3). That the resonance was extremely narrow was apparent from the e+e− data, which showed an experimental width of 2 MeV. This was not the intrinsic width, but the result of the spread in energy of the electron and positron beams due to synchrotron radiation in the SPEAR ring. Additionally, the shape was spread asymmetrically by radiative corrections. If the natural width is much less than the beam spread, the area under the cross section curve Area = dE σ Z is nearly the same as it would be in the absence of the beam spread and radiative corrections. The intrinsic resonance cross section is of the usual Breit{Wigner form given in Chapter 5 2J + 1 π Γ Γ σ = in out (2S + 1)(2S + 1) p2 (E E )2 + Γ2 =4 1 2 cm − 0 tot where the incident particles have spin S1; S2 = 1=2 and momentum p M =2 = E =2. If the observed cross section is that for annihilation into cm ≈ 0 hadrons, then Γout = Γhad, the partial width for the resonance to decay into hadrons, while Γin = Γee is the electronic width. Assuming that the observed resonance has spin J = 1, we find by integrating the above, 2 6π ΓeeΓhad Area = 2 M Γtot The area under of the resonance curve measured at SPEAR is about 10 nb GeV. If we assume Γ Γ and use the measured mass, M = 3:1 had ≈ tot GeV, we find Γ 4:2 keV. The accepted value is 4.7 keV. Subsequent measure- ee ≈ ments of the branching ratio into electron pairs ( 7%) led to a determination ≈ of the total width of between 60 and 70 keV, an astonishingly small value for a particle with a mass of 3 GeV.